Is the Chabacano Language Dying in Zamboanga City?

The health of a language could be gauged by how many people speak it in a given locale. In this article, we are going to take an objective look into the health of the Chabacano language in Zamboanga city.

Whenever people (including “experts”) are asked how many Chabacano speakers there are in Zamboanga city, they usually throw around whatever figure that comes into their mind. Depending on their biases, they will come up with a high or low figure. Admittedly, it is hard to come by official data that will give us an accurate number of Chabacano speakers in Zamboanga city.

Today, we are going to consult the 2010 Census of Population and Housing published by the National Statistics Office. Unbeknownst to many, the government conducts a survey on the languages spoken in the country every ten years. The mid-decade census does not include this data.

Unfortunately, the information that we can gather from the census is not as comprehensive as one might hope for. For example it does not detail the number of people who speak a certain language as their mother tongue or second language. There are also some inconsistencies on the way they report data so it is difficult to compare data from decade to decade. Sometimes, they use the number of households and sometimes the number of individuals when reporting the number of speakers of a certain language. There are also instances wherein two different languages used to be counted separately but later are grouped together and counted as one. Having said that, it is still official data from the government and although their reports make it impossible for us to compare the state of the Chabacano language over time, it does allow us to make objective and current observations on the state of the Chabacano language.

In 2010, they chose to report the number of Chabacano speakers by household. According to the 2010 Census of Population and Housing, two in every five households reported speaking Chabacano at home. This is 43.4 percent of the population at that time. This figure should not come as a surprise to anybody who lives in Zamboanga city. A quick visit to a densely populated location in Zamboanga city such as the downtown area will confirm that Chabacano is NOT the language of the majority of Zamboangueños.

I have long suspected that Chabacano was no longer the language of the majority in Zamboanga city. However, since the population of Zamboanga city increases every year, I had reason to believe that the number of Chabacano speakers continue to grow and is not dwindling.

With 43.4 percent of 803,000 individuals reporting Chabacano as the language spoken at home, this number is still significantly much higher compared to the total population of Zamboanga city in the 1970s, a time when old people say most Zamboangueños spoke Chabacano.

In Hacia un corrector ortográfico para la nueva ortografía del chabacano de Zamboanga, Marcelo Yuji Himoro bravely attempts to compare the number of Chabacano speakers (as a percentage of the population) by decade. Himoro does admit that there may be errors in his data as he had to compute them manually.

According to his computations, the last time that Chabacano was the language of the majority was in the 1980s. While it does remain to be the dominant language over the years, the proportion of Chabacano speakers had been suffering an average of about four percent decline every decade. That is a worrying trend. The second language with most number of speakers in Zamboanga city is Cebuano with 21.5% followed closely by Tausug at 18.6%. Unfortunately, I do not have information whether these two languages are at an uptrend in terms of number of speakers in Zamboanga city but if they retain these numbers or even increase them, Chabacano will have lost its status as the dominant language in Zamboanga city in a couple of decades.

Fortunately, not all is lost. The local government as well as Zamboanga-based Chabacano speakers are up in arms. Today, we see a number of Facebook pages publishing posts in Chabacano, Facebook Livestreams doing restaurant reviews in Chabacano, Youtube vlogs in Chabacano, as well as Facebook groups dedicated to the Chabacano language.

All data presented in this article were published in 2010, ten years ago, so it will be very interesting to find out what the 2020 census will reveal. There have been two significant events in the past decade that may have changed the trajectory of Chabacano for better or for worse, the Zamboanga siege (2013) and The Great Lockdown (2020). The former may have contributed to a significant number of Chabacano speakers leaving Zamboanga city as well as a post-war recovery boom that fueled a surge in the number of migrant workers in the city. The latter may have forced some Zamboangueños who have relocated to other cities in the past for economic or security reasons to go back to Zamboanga city perhaps after losing their jobs or their businesses.

The past decade had also seen the implementation of the mother tongue based education which brought back Chabacano as a subject in elementary schools. While the potential impact of this development on Chabacano is significant, we may only see its results after several decades.